If Pyongyang has an equivalent to the late Richard Helms, the Nixon era director of central intelligence who kept the secrets on Vietnam and Iran, that would be Kim Yong-chol, a four-star general and Kim Jong-un confidante. Kim, a former bodyguard of late North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il, is now the director of the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB). The RGB is North Korea’s nerve center for intelligence gathering and such clandestine operations as the recent hacking of Sony by the so-called “Guardians of Peace.”
General Kim Yong-chol was identified as being “responsible for overseeing the attack against Sony,” in a January 18th report in the New York Times, by none other than General James R. Clapper, Jr., the U.S.’s current director of national intelligence. General Clapper met Kim Yong-chol over a 12-course dinner held in Pyongyang in November while he was on a secret mission to secure the release of two imprisoned U.S. citizens. (Pyongyang sent General Clapper a bill for the meal.)
The RGB reportedly has oversight of Bureau 121, Pyongyang’s cyber warfare agency. CNN reported on December 19th that Bureau 121 is “made up of at least 1,800 cyber warriors scattered around the world.” The New York Times added that these “warriors” were “dispatched for two years of training in China and Russia.” Interestingly enough, one of Bureau 121’s major clandestine offices is reportedly located inside the Chilbosan Hotel in Shenyang, a city in northeast China not far from the North Korean border. This raises interesting questions about Beijing’s knowledge of — and even support for — North Korean cyber warfare operations. It seems highly unlikely that such a major intelligence operation could be conducted by a foreign power on Chinese soil without Chinese official awareness. Indeed, it also seems plausible that Beijing’s computer experts have provided training to those North Korean hackers reportedly involved in the Sony attack.
That wouldn’t be surprising: Beijing has its own past controversy with reported cyber attacks, including one mentioned at a 2008 Capitol Hill press conference by then-Virginia Congressman Frank Wolf. Congressman Wolf charged that four computers in his office and two in the offices of New Jersey Congressman Chris Smith, containing “information on dissidents from around the world,” including China, “had been hacked by sources apparently working out of China.”
So just who is this mysterious General Kim Yong-chol, the man who sits at the center of an intricate spider web of North Korean intelligence operations? According to an April 18, 2013 posting on North Korea Leadership Watch, General Kim is a member of North Korea’s powerful Central Military Commission (CMC) and a member of the Korean Workers’ Party Central Committee. He has reportedly accompanied North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on a number of spot inspections and to military training exercises. Like many North Korean leaders, General Kim has had his ups and downs inside Pyongyang’s palace politics, reportedly being temporarily demoted in 2012 before being restored to his current position. Kim also has alleged ties to North Korea’s 180,000-strong special operations forces designed to wage “asymmetric warfare” against South Korea.
According to a March 6, 2013, Reuters report, General Kim is “believed to have masterminded” the torpedoing of the South Korean naval vessel Cheonan in March 2010, which killed 46 South Korean sailors. He also supposedly “had a hand” in the shelling of a South Korean island later that year, resulting in the deaths of two South Korean civilians and two marines. Finally, Kim’s nefarious activities reportedly include “the hacking of a South Korean bank.”
Kim Yong-chol emerged from the shadows to take the stage in the spring of 2013 as a chief North Korean propagandist. This was a time of heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula following North Korea’s third nuclear test and the imposition of additional UN Security Council sanctions. First, as reported by Reuters, General Kim became “the new face of North Korea’s military threat to the United States” by announcing, in measured tones, that North Korea was terminating its armistice with the United States that ended the Korean War. “The message behind putting somebody like Kim up there to make that statement is clearly to escalate tensions,” Baek Seung-joo of the Korea Institute of Defence Analyses, a government-affiliated think tank in Seoul, said at the time.
Following that appearance, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, Kim then assembled foreign ambassadors in Pyongyang to advise them that North Korea could no longer guarantee the safety of diplomatic personnel and foreign nationals due to the ongoing crisis.
Kim is reportedly known for having a temper as hot as kimchi. North Korea Leadership Watch has noted that “General Kim has been difficult for his superiors to manage.” General Clapper has confirmed Kim’s prickly nature. According to a January 15th article in the Washington Post, General Kim was not an amiable dinner partner for Clapper at their November meeting. “General Kim, who claimed to me that he was my North Korean counterpart,” Clapper said, “spent most of the meal berating me about American aggression and what terrible people we were, arguing his country was ‘under siege’ by its neighbors and blaming Washington for supporting them. He got louder and louder,” Clapper recalled, “and he kept leaning toward me, pointing his finger at my chest and saying that U.S. and South Korean [military] exercises were a provocation to war.”
General Kim is also a man who is apparently free to flout the rules. In a country where people have been executed for watching titillating “Korean wave” television dramas, General Kim is on record as having publicly recited favorite lines from Seoul soap operas. At a 2007 meeting in the truce village of Panmunjom, for example, Kim baffled his South Korean counterparts by quoting from a Seoul soap opera he had recently watched.
So is the acerbic Kim Yong-chol prepared to take the fall and disappear again into the shadows if President Obama follows through with his promised “proportional response” to North Korea for the Sony hacking?
The Obama Administration has already imposed new sanctions against three North Korean companies and ten government officials as a result of the attack. But Congress is demanding additional action, which could increase the pressure on General Kim Yong-chol’s clandestine operations. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce has said, “We need to step up and target those financial institutions in Asia and beyond that are supporting the brutal and dangerous North Korean regime. Such sanctions have crippled North Korea in the past, leaving the regime unable to buy the loyalty of its generals.” Rep. Royce, who introduced North Korean sanctions legislation in the last Congress, is reportedly preparing similar legislation.
Others are even suggesting that Pyongyang’s dalliance with cyber terrorism necessitates North Korea’s re-listing as a state sponsor of terrorism. Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen introduced, on January 8th, H.R. 204 “the North Korea Sanctions and Diplomatic Nonrecognition Act of 2015” which cites “the recent cyber-attack targeting Sony Pictures Entertainment and the threats against movie theaters and moviegoers” as a reason for the Secretary of State “to re-designate North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism” immediately.
A recent Congressional Research Service (CRS) report, titled “North Korea: Back on the State Sponsors of Terrorism Lists?” has drawn attention by putting forward a contrary argument. The CRS states that, “Placing North Korea back on the lists could forestall any future diplomatic initiatives between the United States and North Korea… Additionally, North Korean leaders might try to use a redesignation to convince other countries, particularly China, that the United States is to blame if tensions between Pyongyang and Washington increase. Even without encouragement from North Korea, China may be inclined to use redesignation as a pretext for opposing U.S. and South Korean efforts to increase pressure on North Korea through other means.”
The ultimate outcome of the current Sony controversy has yet to be determined. Yet General Kim Yong-chol, the man who keeps North Korea’s many, malevolent secrets, has certainly left his mark and will continue to spin his web.
Dennis P. Halpin, a former adviser on Asian issues to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, is a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute at SAIS (Johns Hopkins) and a consultant to the Poblete Analysis Group.
